Man of the Hour (12 page)

“I think let’s be quiet awhile.” Nasser wiped away the stray tear and lifted his chin. “I don’t want to talk no more. Let’s just be together, like a family.”

9

AS THE ELEVATOR DOORS
shut, David closed his eyes and got that same visceral jolt of the bus exploding. But when he opened them again, he was back on the elevator, being carried up to see Renee and Arthur on the eighteenth floor. For a few seconds, he wasn’t sure which was real and which was hallucination—the polished oak walls or Seniqua screaming, metal twisting, and the floor buckling under him. He had to see his family immediately. It was a physical craving. He needed the tactile sensation of being near them, touching them, to make him real again and assure him that he had indeed survived.

The elevator doors popped open and he stepped off quickly, coughing as if his lungs were still full of poison.

“Jesus, what happened to you?” Renee was waiting for him in the corridor, wearing gray sweats and propping open the apartment door with her foot.

“I was in a fire.” He followed her into the apartment, realizing mat he might still be a little raw and smelly in spite of the shower he’d just taken at home.

“For real?” The door closed behind her.

“Yeah, for real. Didn’t you see it on television? Our bus blew up outside school.”

“Shit.” She came over to hug him. “Are you all right?”

“I guess so.”

She reached up to put her arms around his neck and he closed his eyes, waiting to feel the bus explode once more. But instead there was only the sensation of stillness and her cool forehead resting against his chin. His metabolism was finally starting to slow down. He felt skin and hair and heard Joni Mitchell singing on the kitchen tape player. He opened his eyes and saw sunlight streaming between the buildings and Margot Fonteyn dancing above the couch.

“Hey, is that Daddy?” Arthur called from the other room.

They moved apart from each other a little, embarrassed by the Polaroid flash of intimacy.

“You better go talk to him.” Renee touched his chest. “Show him you’re okay before he hears anything and gets worried.”

“Yeah, of course.” He took her fingers and kissed them, “I’ll be right back.”

Hungry for more flesh-on-flesh contact, he went down the hall to the boy’s bedroom.

“Hey, tiger. What’s happening?”

“Odysseus is killing all the suitors.”

Arthur was sprawled on the bedroom carpet, arranging toy soldiers around a plastic castle. The floor was covered with the detritus of a child’s life: comic books, Disney action figures, Lego blocks, Playmobil fortresses, Transformers, and cap guns. An archeologist could come in and discover generations of pop culture buried in layers. David knelt and put his hand on his son’s back.

“Why is he doing that?”

“He wants to take back his family,” said Arthur, furrowing his brow in concentration.

David saw how enormous his hand looked on the boy’s narrow back. From palm to fingertips, he could easily span Arthur’s waist. This was good. This was real. This was life. He leaned down and nuzzled the boy’s hair.

“Look, buddy, something kind of serious happened at school today. I’ll tell you more about it later. But right now all you need to know is I’m all right.”

“Okay,” Arthur said casually, turning onto his side. “Dad, tell me about the Valkyries again.”

For a second, David was disoriented. Was this relevant? “The Valkyries from the book we were reading the other night?” He blinked, trying to get on the boy’s wavelength.

“Yeah. I really, really want to know.”

David steepled his fingers and felt himself getting dizzy for a moment. He considered telling Arthur more about the explosion, but now the timing didn’t seem right.

“Um, I guess you’re talking about how the Valkyries look down from Valhalla and choose which warriors are going to die that day,” he said slowly. “And then they swoop down and tap them on the shoulders.”

“Yeah, yeah! Keep going.”

David closed his eyes and breathed in, still trying to get himself oriented. You’re okay. You’re not going to die. You’re with your son. The hard part is over. The fire is out.

“And so then,” he said, opening his eyes, “the warrior who’s been tapped knows this is the day he will die, and he rushes around killing as many of the enemy as he can until he falls. Because this is his last day.”

“And what else?”

Breathe in, breathe out. You weren’t the one who died today. “And then he’s carried up to Valhalla, where he lives with all the Valkyries and great warriors in history, eating and fighting and fighting and eating until the end of time.”

“Cool!” Arthur threw his arms around David’s neck. “Thank you, Daddy.”

“My privilege.”

His exhilaration tempered by the knowledge of Sam’s death, he kissed his son on the top of his head. Why me? he wondered briefly. Why am I the one who gets to live?

He looked down at the back of Arthur’s red hair standing on end like a cock’s comb and decided the answer was probably somewhere in there.

From the next room, David could hear Renee turning the television up, the traditional signal that it was time for him to leave. This was going to be a short visit after all.

“All right, buddy.” He stood up. “So I’m going to see you Friday after school.”

“Dad.” Arthur rolled onto his side. “Mommy cut herself.”

“What?”

Arthur turned back onto his stomach, playing with his soldiers again, blissfully unaware of the chill he’d put in his father’s belly.

“What did you just say, buddy?”

“Nothing.” Arthur made machine-gun sounds and banged his sneakers together, losing himself in his little world again. “I’m just playing.”

Afraid to ask any more, David squeezed the boy’s foot and started to walk out through the living room. Anton, the boyfriend, was sitting next to Renee on the couch. Wearing David’s old red bathrobe with the belt double-knotted in the front.

Unbelievably, he was a couple of inches taller than David, so the sleeves were too short and the hem rose up above his knees. His hair was long and silky and much more poetic than his face, which had a mildly sluggish and complacent look. He wore a thin gold chain around his neck and an expensive-looking turquoise Navajo bracelet.

“David, you know Anton,” Renee said cautiously.

So here was the final aftershock. Yes, he’d met Anton before, but never this casually. The coziness of the scene made him a little sick to his stomach. Another man in
his
house, wearing
his
bathrobe, sitting next to
his
wife, on
his
couch. How’s that for cutting you down to size, big guy?

“How you doing?” David offered his hand.

“Yeah, what’s up, man?” Anton gave him a kind of limp hep-cat hand slap and the bracelet slid down his arm.

David sucked at his teeth and sneaked a glance at Renee. What did she see in this guy? Was she impressed because he was a musician? Or was this evidence of some worrisome deterioration in judgment on her part? She used to have better taste.

As the six o’clock news began on television, David looked her over, trying to find the cut Arthur mentioned. But no bandage was apparent.

On the screen, a chiseled-looking young anchorman was introducing a segment about the bus exploding. And then there it was again, the nightmare starting, this time with a little graphic at the bottom of the screen that said: New York 1 News Exclusive. No longer just a vision in his head.

The camera turned just after the first explosion, so the bus was already tilting forward with its hood on fire and the kids running away, screaming. And then here was David Fitzgerald again, lumbering around to the back of the bus, opening the door, and getting a leg up from Ray-Za. Then David watched himself climb onboard and go charging into the smoke. The camera didn’t record the fear in his head; it just caught glimpses of him through the smoke, making his way toward Seniqua, halfway out the window and bawling piteously.

Everything seemed so much faster and more offhanded than it did in real life. Watching it was beyond surrealistic; it made David feel slightly psychotic. Like he had no business still being in his body. The angle had finally shifted to the back of the bus; the cameraman had moved there just in time to catch Seniqua’s friends carrying her off and David jumping down after her.

“Oh my God,” Renee was saying. “Is this really you?”

The same question had occurred to David. He was aware of the fact that both she and Anton were looking at him strangely, as if they couldn’t quite connect the man in the living room with the image on the screen. In the meantime, the angle had shifted once more and he saw himself trying to resuscitate Seniqua. The video footage here was much more frightening because it was so stark and ordinary. The cameraman had been leaning right over David’s shoulder, and the feeling of death approaching jumped right through the camera lens. Without edits or dramatic music, the plainness of it was heart-stopping. And then David saw himself leaning over and breathing life back into the girl.

Watching it from this angle, he first felt scared again, and then oddly detached. He sat down.

“God!” Renee moved close to him and touched his arm. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“God!” She scrunched up her face, reabsorbing the shock of what she’d just seen. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. The bus blew up. You know as much as I do.”

He tried to tell her about the intensity of the flames and the detective who questioned him afterward, but she was staring at his forehead with a dreamy, faraway look.

“Oh, David. I always knew you’d do something like this.”

“You did?”

She took his hand and squeezed it. For a second, the electricity of the contact bypassed his sense of time and reason, and he wished they could be alone for a few minutes to talk sense to each other. But then he noticed Anton staring over her shoulder with a mixture of dismay and disbelief.

“So you’re the man of the hour,” he said.

“Well, I don’t know.” David coughed.

“You saved those kids.”

“Actually only one kid. Somebody else died. The driver.”

Renee let go of his hand and drew away from him. “Shit, man, this is so weird,” she said. “It’s like, all these levels of reality. I’m sitting here, watching this, thinking
is this him or is this a movie?
”

She laughed a little wildly and he smiled to humor her. “Well, that was—”

“You know, I’m sitting here, trying, trying, trying to learn these lines …” She gestured at an open copy of
The Glass Menagerie
on the coffee table. “And then I turn on the television and
there you are
. It’s like you were in a movie.”

Her hands shook as she started to light a cigarette. He wondered if seeing the father of her child in danger had somehow unnerved her. Or did it mean she still cared for him?

“It didn’t feel like a movie when it was happening, Renee,” he said gently. “It felt real. The driver died.”

That seemed to calm her a little. “But you’re all right?”

“I’m all right.”

She hugged him once more and then drew back. She was looking at him with that old glitter in her eyes. That crazy connection between them, he was feeling it again. That sense that it was just the two of them against the rest of the world. The way they used to believe in each other and egg each other on. On this very couch, they’d made love one morning after he’d called in sick to school on a whim. He remembered the green robe slipping off her bare white shoulders, as he reared up over her, covering her with his body but trying not to crush her. Maybe it wasn’t too late to try to put things back together. They needed each other; a man needs his woman, a boy needs his mother and father. But then he recalled what Arthur had said a minute ago:
Mommy cut herself.

“So you doing okay?” He looked her over once more, checking her wrists and ankles for scratches and abrasions.

“Of course.” Her smile turned to bewilderment. “But you’re the one who almost got killed today. So why are you asking me if I’m okay? Do I not seem okay?”

“No, you seem fine.”

No visible cuts. It’s all right, David thought. Kids make things up all the time.

Anton put a hand on her shoulder, as if staking a claim on her. “Shouldn’t we be getting ready for dinner?” he mumbled.

Renee drew up suddenly, like a cat arching her back.
“I
am speaking to David,”
she said.

“I know.” Anton sulkily played with his Navajo bracelet. “But it’s getting to be time.”

“I know what time it is, Anton. But I am
speaking
to David.”

So there was tension between them. Fine, thought David. Maybe their little West Coast swing wouldn’t come off after all and he wouldn’t have to fight to keep her and Arthur in the city.

“Maybe I should go,” he said, starting to rise.

“Did I ask you to go? Is that what I was saying?”

“No, but it’s late.”

He recognized the mood she was getting into and knew enough to stay out of its way. A half-eaten green apple was turning brown on a plate next to the open script. Let nature take its course, he thought. If we can reconcile, we’ll reconcile. No sense forcing the issue tonight.

“So I guess I’ll see you Friday,” he said slowly, moving toward the door. “I’ll come by after school to pick up Arthur.”

He decided not to remind her that they also had appointments with the psychiatrist and the judge in their divorce case next week. He didn’t want to set off any more emotional depth charges here. His chest ached and his limbs felt heavy. This day had already taken too much out of him.

“God, David.” Renee ran across the room and kissed him on the cheek as he put his hand on the doorknob. “I’m so proud of you.”

He got a static shock from her. “Are you really?”

“Now I wish I could make someone proud of me.”

10

DOWN AT THE HOUSE
on Avenue Z, Elizabeth Hamdy and the rest of her family were in the living room, sitting transfixed in front of the forty-inch-wide Pioneer home entertainment center, watching the
Headline News
at eight o’clock. Images of the bus burning in front of the school had already been repeated enough to become a kind of instant icon, a symbol of vulnerability. All over the country, millions of parents were seeing it and thinking about how much it looked like buses they’d put their own children on just this morning.